As I often do, I focused a lot on the anchor and left the filler aside.

After swapping back and forth over the course of the week I settled on Ralph for my main anchor. I was with him on Monday 1x Ralph, 1x Creed II, 1x Bohemian Rhapsody, and 5x The Favorite.

Later in the week I was less sure and experimenting, ending up with 1x Ralph and 7x Widows.

I wish I could say that was a well thought out pick, but in reality it was something I was tinkering with and copied over to think about at some point on Thursday. And then I forgot about it until about an hour after the leagues all locked and I was stuck with that.

I did think that Widows could possibly have a shot at best performer, though I honestly should have kept to six screens of it given how much of my budget was left over. And Widows did end up as the second best price performer, but a silver medal counts for naught in the scores.

Instead, come the Saturday morning estimates The Possession of Hannah Grace was way up the charts relative to its FML pricing. While the long range tracking forecast it around $3 million, it was headed past $6 million.

I guess I am not the only one who has trouble gauging the horror genre during the holiday season.

The film did not sag at all come the Sunday estimates, were its earnings per film buck was double Widows. So unless you had multiple screens of Hannah Grace you were not going to do very well on the final week. The scores for the week ended up like this:

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $89,976,297

Ben’s X-Wing Express – $83,985,996

Goat Water Picture Palace – $81,370,880

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $79,691,857

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $56,857,828

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $56,389,016

Joanie’s Joint – $55,913,962

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $55,497,987

Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $55,497,987

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $55,437,311

I HAS BAD TASTE – $55,097,185

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $55,029,759

Too Orangey For Crows – $54,645,486

grannanj’s Cineplex – $54,536,607

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $54,536,607

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $54,142,730

Corr, Ben, Goat and SynCaine all bet on Hannah Grace. Corr even got the perfect pick, which was 1x The Grinch, 1x Creed II, and 6x Hannah Grace.

Between them and the rest of the pack was more than a $20 million gap. The gap between the top and bottom of the remaining twelve people who played… full score list here on the final week… was less than $3 million. A tight race amongst those who eschewed Hannah Grace.

That left the overall scores for the season looking like this:

Goat Water Picture Palace – $1,002,236,972

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – $994,216,623

Ben’s X-Wing Express – $970,491,788

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – $969,867,323

Too Orangey For Crows – $949,946,148

I HAS BAD TASTE – $939,059,282

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – $920,250,209

grannanj’s Cineplex – $915,931,935

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – $900,117,327

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – $899,596,418

Joanie’s Joint – $871,223,508

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – $857,227,598

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – $819,287,831

Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – $792,913,965

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – $782,972,039

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – $559,786,290

Goat going with Hannah Grace was enough for them to hold onto first place. Corr’s perfect pick jumped him over me and into second place by a fair margin. The surprise was Ben, who was off to a slow start the season, but who rallied in the last few weeks and managed to push me into fourth place by a little more that $600K.

And on the alternate scoring front, Corr managed to elude the one scenario that would deny him first place.

Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex – 81

Goat Water Picture Palace – 69

Wilhelm’s Kul Tiras Kino – 62

Ben’s X-Wing Express – 58

Too Orangey For Crows – 57

SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights – 48

I HAS BAD TASTE – 47

Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex – 43

Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex – 42

grannanj’s Cineplex – 38

Cyanbane’s Neuticles Viewing Party – 38

Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite – 38

Paks’ Pancakes & Pics – 34

Joanie’s Joint – 28

Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies – 17

Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex – 15

Corr took first and Goat second, with me in third. Ben continued his climb up the list, but I was able to hold him off here, so he ended up in fourth place.

As for scoring this, everybody managed to make it into the top ten at least three times. Only Corr managed to make it there every week of the season. While the end ranking wasn’t radically different that the traditional cumulative scores, it was different. It could also be much more volatile from week to week. However, no scoring system that accumulates over thirteen weeks is going to let you “catch up” at the end, so the top three were near the top during the latter half of the season.

Congrats to Goat and Corr, winners of the two different scoring systems.

Here is where usually write about what films are coming up this week. However, as I noted last week, I am taking a break from this until the summer blockbuster season rolls around again. Still, I am half tempted just to do a “what’s new at the movies” post every Wednesday. After a year and a half of posts just about every week about FML, movies on Wednesday is almost a thing.

Unfortunately, nothing big is hitting this week for FML. In fact, there isn’t much compelling coming up for the whole Winter season. At least not for me. My wife is excited for Mary Poppins Returns, the original being one of her favorite movies from childhood. But when Mary Poppins comes up I start in with whether or not anybody would know who Julie Andrews even was if she hadn’t done Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music so early in her career.

Anyway, as I said, the league will stay up. If you have your own league you want me to join I’m game. I’ll be back some the summer with more FML posts. I do wonder what I will post on Wednesday now.

I enjoy picking each week, but unlike fantasy football the lack of a break can definitely make it tough to maintain enthusiasm every week. I’m guessing that is doubly true for a weekly write-up. I do appreciate them though.

Maybe it’s just coincidence, but my performance over the three seasons I’ve played seems to have an inverse relationship with the amount of time I spend thinking about picks during the week. This season I mostly limited myself to checking out the slate briefly in the early week and then spending 15 minutes late Friday morning looking at the Thursday numbers and checking some of the more prominent chatter posts. Clearly my own ruminations serve only to lead me astray and are to be ignored.

I also think I have an advantage living in the Atlantic Time Zone. If I lived in California I’d probably never manage to see the preview numbers before the lock.

Congrats to the winners and thanks to Wilhelm for hosting it and doing the excellent write-ups.

I really enjoyed the Fall season, the second I’ve done. I was pleased enough with my placing although I would have liked to have held on to 4th. Horror is hot right now, that’s really obvious. Just about every horror-inflected release does better than expected. I knew that and yet I still ignored Hannah Grace, which was naive.

I don’t seem to be able to get the hang of picking the really good line-ups. I was the only person in the top seven not to take a single first place in the whole season. I only had one real stinker of a week though. I suspect my FML tactics are similar to my poker-playing, which made me very unwelcome at the table when I was in college.

I think I’ll carry on picking for the next season and use it to try and be a bit more experimental. I’m definitely not going to get into the situation I found myself in during the latter half of the Fall season, though, where I was routinely spending up to a couple of hours on it.